There's something like 140,000 schools plus colleges in the U.S, with about 72 million students enrolled. If you put guns in each of those schools, imagine how many deaths you'd see each year due to accident, suicide, theft, criminal action of the gun's owner, or unjustified use (e.g. shooting a drugged-up crazy-acting student who is unarmed or relatively harmless). You can look up the rates of incidence for how much those things increase when a gun is on the property.

The total number of deaths from school massacres in the US in the past 20 years is 113, or 5.65 per year. You'd easily surpass that number by arming school administration. Or at the very least, you'd be exacerbating the culture of fear and violence for very little-to-no gain in lives saved.

Also, if we decided that everyone should carry a gun for protection, you'd have people like me with a gun. And said gun would pretty much be forced on those people.

I don't care for guns. Nothing you can say and no statistics you can show me will change that. There aren't enough gun classes in the world that will change that, either. I would hurt myself or others, I just know it. I'm old and set in my ways. I don't want to carry a gun to feel safe. I want assault rifles in the hands of the military. THAT would make me feel safer.

I don't want guns banned. I think that's silly. But it's also silly that such a deadly thing isn't regulated more. NO PRIVATE CITIZEN needs an assault rifle.

No need to read futher. You are, as usual, going on hypotheticals. What I am seeing is could and should which mean nothing.

I'm sorry, we're debating possible courses of action to take with regard to the issue of mass shootings like the one that occurred last Friday, but we're not allowed to present hypotheticals? Er... What are we supposed to do then?

Quote:

Stronger, firmer laws against guns could and should solve these issues, but it could also increase death tolls. Make it easier to obtain and conceal carry, it could scare the bad people enough not to shoot at anyone, it could also let loose some trigger happy idiot.

Well, we could do that, but isn't it a whole lot more useful (and interesting) for people to take different sides and then make some kind of argument about why the think that doing X will result in Y and not Z? Just a wild thought...

Yodabunny wrote:

gbaji wrote:

It's a degree of restriction that can't exist in the US under the 2nd amendment.

Hmm, funny that eh?

Yup. I've not made any secret that my argument is based on the assumption that any proposed course of action must fit within the existing 2nd amendment.

Also, if we decided that everyone should carry a gun for protection, you'd have people like me with a gun. And said gun would pretty much be forced on those people.

No one is remotely arguing to force people to own guns. There is a middle ground between not allowing firearms and requiring them.

Quote:

I don't care for guns. Nothing you can say and no statistics you can show me will change that. There aren't enough gun classes in the world that will change that, either. I would hurt myself or others, I just know it. I'm old and set in my ways. I don't want to carry a gun to feel safe. I want assault rifles in the hands of the military. THAT would make me feel safer.

How about knowing that there are people who are law abiding and do know how to handle guns safely who are carrying them on the street around you, so that should something happen neither you nor most of the population has to know how to or be comfortable handling guns, but will still be protected by the 5% or so who do and are. It's strange to me that you're comfortable with the military being armed, but not with your fellow law abiding citizens (most of whom btw are military or police, or former members thereof).

Quote:

I don't want guns banned. I think that's silly. But it's also silly that such a deadly thing isn't regulated more. NO PRIVATE CITIZEN needs an assault rifle.

It's currently illegal (absent ridiculous licensing requirements) for a private citizen to own an assault rifle in the US. So you're safe! Yay!

What's funny is just how often the exact sort of statement is made. It seems quite reasonable, right? Thus, it seems quite unreasonable to oppose it. But the gun control advocates play with the phrases "assault rifle" and assault weapon" in order to make their unreasonable proposals seem perfectly reasonable. They do want to ban all guns. Period. They will lie, cheat, steal, and do whatever else they need to do to accomplish that. If making you think that we haven't banned "assault rifles" helps them pass laws that ban things which aren't assault rifles, they'll do it.

Look at the actual proposals, not the language used to describe them. It's often quite eye opening.

The type of gun isn't as important as how much ammunition it has available for it to continuously fire without need to stop. Listening to the radio this morning and this afternoon, a guy made a pretty convincing argument about the old AR ban, how vague and stupid the definitions were, and how much easier it would be to just say "no clips more than 5 bullets" for example.

Of course, I have a semi-automatic .22 rifle in storage with a clip that holds 12 shots...

The type of gun isn't as important as how much ammunition it has available for it to continuously fire without need to stop. Listening to the radio this morning and this afternoon, a guy made a pretty convincing argument about the old AR ban, how vague and stupid the definitions were, and how much easier it would be to just say "no clips more than 5 bullets" for example.

Because the folks pushing for such bans generally have this idea of banning "guns that are scary", but there isn't really a way to define that legally without a ban that hits every gun, even those that aren't scary.

Quote:

Of course, I have a semi-automatic .22 rifle in storage with a clip that holds 12 shots...

Exactly. There's no way to legally define an AR-15 such that it also doesn't include any random rifle as well. Not without resorting to arbitrary physical characteristics which can be trivially changed to comply with the law. The problem is that they can't just limit total magazine capacity because there are a **** of a lot of "non scary" weapons with fairly large magazines. The sheer volume of 12-16 round magazines for various guns which no one would remotely call "assault weapons", and which very clearly look to be normal hunting rifles and whatnot makes it nearly impossible to achieve the intended goal.

They could try to just put hard bans on magazines, but they'd likely never get them passed. Too many Democrats like to hunt for that to work. At the end of the day, you end out with silly laws designed to appease the nutty anti-gun folks who don't realize ahead of time just how useless the laws really will be. Like all the people who today lament the expiration of the Brady Act. Yeah. Why? Because they've created this myth that it was somehow powerful legislation that was helping prevent gun violence or something. It wasn't, and it didn't, but they want to feel like they're doing some good, so they convince themselves of this, and then when the law expires, they lament it like we somehow just passed back into the dark ages or something.

The Brady Act was passed, and had no impact on gun crime at all. It expired and had no impact on gun crime at all. That's the reality. I just think it's absurd that we may be ignoring the lesson of that law and heading into another round of feel-good stupidity from the anti-gun lobby.

The type of gun isn't as important as how much ammunition it has available for it to continuously fire without need to stop. Listening to the radio this morning and this afternoon, a guy made a pretty convincing argument about the old AR ban, how vague and stupid the definitions were, and how much easier it would be to just say "no clips more than 5 bullets" for example.

Of course, I have a semi-automatic .22 rifle in storage with a clip that holds 12 shots...

Semi-automatic rifles are not automatically assault rifles. And for that matter neither is the AR-15.

Quote:

In countries where assault rifles aren't readily available people just don't think about shooting up schools full of children, well, I'm sure they think about it but it's quickly discarded as unfeasible because the logistics of doing so are ridiculous. There's no glory factor in stopping to reload your 12 gauge every 3 rounds while everyone hops out the windows and some big janitor tackles you.

One failed attempt at blowing up a 'plane with liquid explosives 10 years ago and now the whole world is forbidden to travel with a bottle of shampoo or a drink of water and here some people are seriously having a debate as to whether having even more guns available would be an effective counter to the threat of guns being used against children in schools is just brilliant.

The type of gun isn't as important as how much ammunition it has available for it to continuously fire without need to stop. Listening to the radio this morning and this afternoon, a guy made a pretty convincing argument about the old AR ban, how vague and stupid the definitions were, and how much easier it would be to just say "no clips more than 5 bullets" for example.

Of course, I have a semi-automatic .22 rifle in storage with a clip that holds 12 shots...

Semi-automatic rifles are not automatically assault rifles. And for that matter neither is the AR-15.

I can't find an English article for it at the moment but the news here reported that since Belgium started enforcing a law that means you have to prove that you need a gun to be able to buy any sort of gun or rifle in 2006 deaths from gun shootings (murders and suicides) have halved from 134 in 2005 to 68 in 2010.

____________________________

Theophany wrote:YOU'RE AN ELITIST @#%^ AETHIEN, NO WONDER YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND PEOPLE HATE YOU. someproteinguy wrote:Aethien you take more terrible pictures than a Japanese tourist. Astarin wrote:One day, Maz, you'll learn not to click on anything Aeth links.

Yes. Get past your knee jerk opposition to the idea and think about it.

Yeah, thinking with my head, I can still see how that's a bad idea. Incidences of mass shootings at schools might decrease in your scenario, but I can see how other gun violence would go up.

Yeah, like the depressed, mentally unstable teacher who caught his/her spouse cheating the night before who decides life isn't worth living and the little runts in his/her class are better off not growing up to become the kind of ******** his/her spouse is.

None of that happened anywhere gun control was enacted, but none of those places are really very demographically similar to the US.

I've been thinking a lot over the past 15 years or so about why the US has more gun violence than other countries, correcting for gun availability. I think we're a gun culture because of our cultural heritage, for lack of a less pompous phrase, of the rugged individualist. Our fascination for solving problems with confrontation, for solving problems as individuals, for walking like a ******** MAN, for being a cowboy hero instead of a wussy negotiator, all contribute.

I don't know how you heal a culture.

____________________________

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Yeah, like the depressed, mentally unstable cop on school duty who caught his/her spouse cheating the night before who decides life isn't worth living and the little runts in his/her school are better off not growing up to become the kind of @#%^s his/her spouse is.

See, everything is a hypothetical!

____________________________

"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin

Yeah, like the depressed, mentally unstable cop on school duty who caught his/her spouse cheating the night before who decides life isn't worth living and the little runts in his/her school are better off not growing up to become the kind of @#%^s his/her spouse is.

See, everything is a hypothetical!

I have to believe that the more guns there are - regardless of their legal status, the more deaths to guns there will be. We have a LOT of guns in this country. We have a lot of gun deaths.

@gbaji, if you want to simply reduce mass shootings specifically in schools then yes, armed guards in every school will probably do that. But in the big picture adding armed guards to a community simply puts more guns on the streets.

I have to believe that the more guns there are - regardless of their legal status, the more deaths to guns there will be.

I don't think you read what I quoted, as its changed from his original words. I agree with you.

In light of this tragedy, I'd like to see the response be, 1) AN assault rifles ban that makes sense, 2) Limits placed on magazine capacities, 3) A gun license requirement for anyone whom wants to buy bullets 4) A mental health evaluation as a requirement for a gun license and reevaluations when renewing said licenese 5) Easier access to mental health facilities for anyone and everyone who needs it, & 5) Mental Health professionals given somewhat broader powers to deal with potentially violent patients (While I'm all for doctor-patient confidentiality, I think when it comes to potentially dangerous individuals, exceptions should be made) 6) Anyone whom owns a gun subject to one spot inspection a year to ensure said guns are stored safely 7) Finger print locks on all guns themselves as well as cases.

I expect #2 to maybe happen & am unsure if outside of James Bond, if #7 is science fiction or not.

Edited, Dec 18th 2012 9:08am by Omegavegeta

____________________________

"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin

Yeah, like the depressed, mentally unstable cop on school duty who caught his/her spouse cheating the night before who decides life isn't worth living and the little runts in his/her school are better off not growing up to become the kind of @#%^s his/her spouse is.

See, everything is a hypothetical!

I'm not sure what your point here is. You can plug in any scenario and the effect is the same. The more guns we have, the more opportunity there exists to abuse them. Whether the intent is to arm only the "safe" individuals for the "protection" of others, the fact remains that an armed teacher or an armed police officer or an armed mall security guard can still fly off the hook and start shooting. The point stands, then, that arming staff members to protect the children is a bad idea.

The point stands, then, that arming staff members to protect the children is a bad idea.

I thought your point was to arm teachers. My mistake if it wasn't.

____________________________

"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin

If you don't have guns, shooters will always rampage with bomb-firing crossbows or something.

Easy-peasy.

Uglysasquatch wrote:

gbaji doesn't believe more guns in the community is a bad thing at all.

Only if it's civilian jamokes running around packing. He didn't seem interested in saving us by militarizing the schools and patrolling the malls with soldiers. I'm starting to think he cares more about the guns than he does our safety

I've been thinking a lot over the past 15 years or so about why the US has more gun violence than other countries, correcting for gun availability. I think we're a gun culture because of our cultural heritage, for lack of a less pompous phrase, of the rugged individualist. Our fascination for solving problems with confrontation, for solving problems as individuals, for walking like a ******** MAN, for being a cowboy hero instead of a wussy negotiator, all contribute.

I don't know how you heal a culture.

You don't. It's integral to the big lie of the myth of American capitalism. If you remove the "America is magic and her people are fully self realized ubermenches" fantasy you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide, and lucked into a near perfect treasure trove of resources through an accident of geography. That's a much tougher sell as an explanation of why the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth than "American Exceptionalism".

____________________________

Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? ***. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

One failed attempt at blowing up a 'plane with liquid explosives 10 years ago and now the whole world is forbidden to travel with a bottle of shampoo or a drink of water and here some people are seriously having a debate as to whether having even more guns available would be an effective counter to the threat of guns being used against children in schools is just brilliant.

Well duh, it's simple economics. An airliner costs millions of dollars and probably has important business people on it. Kids really don't have any buying power, and half of them are probably welfare babies anyway.

His Excellency Aethien wrote:

I can't find an English article for it at the moment but the news here reported that since Belgium started enforcing a law that means you have to prove that you need a gun to be able to buy any sort of gun or rifle in 2006 deaths from gun shootings (murders and suicides) have halved from 134 in 2005 to 68 in 2010.

Why must you be so sensible? It really makes us look bad.

Smasharoo wrote:

I've been thinking a lot over the past 15 years or so about why the US has more gun violence than other countries, correcting for gun availability. I think we're a gun culture because of our cultural heritage, for lack of a less pompous phrase, of the rugged individualist. Our fascination for solving problems with confrontation, for solving problems as individuals, for walking like a ******** MAN, for being a cowboy hero instead of a wussy negotiator, all contribute.

I don't know how you heal a culture.

You don't. It's integral to the big lie of the myth of American capitalism. If you remove the "America is magic and her people are fully self realized ubermenches" fantasy you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide, and lucked into a near perfect treasure trove of resources through an accident of geography. That's a much tougher sell as an explanation of why the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth than "American Exceptionalism".

Well, to be fair those European types had their chance with it. Thankfully they bought into the stereotype that the Americas were a resource-poor land with smaller/inferior animals and weak people. Not worth fighting for.

It's coming out that the bullets he used were designed to break up in the body in order to tear through bones & such.

Would someone more gun savvy than me explain why these kinds of bullets are available to anyone but police & military?

____________________________

"The Rich are there to take all of the money & pay none of the taxes, the middle class is there to do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the crap out of the middle class." -George Carlin

Now my wife wants me to get a gun. Hopefully all my time playing shooters gives me an edge!

____________________________

publiusvarus wrote:

we all know liberals are well adjusted american citizens who only want what's best for society. While conservatives are evil money grubbing scum who only want to sh*t on the little man and rob the world of its resources.

It's coming out that the bullets he used were designed to break up in the body in order to tear through bones & such.

Would someone more gun savvy than me explain why these kinds of bullets are available to anyone but police & military?

Wiki says that Fragmenting bullets are used in hunting small vermin to ensure that no matter where you hit them they die instantly (more 'humane'). I'm sure the news report makes them seem like some super-bullet designed merely the maim large animals. I'm imagining "in order to tear through bones" is something slightly exaggerated.

.223s are commonly used to hunt varmints as well. I don't know why, since there isn't too much of a varmint problem around here that necessitates hunting them. I do know they're lightweight rounds with high velocity that can cause shock in the target (or, if drugged up, make the target not even realize they've been shot).

And they're cheap to produce.

____________________________

George Carlin wrote:

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? ***. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

It's coming out that the bullets he used were designed to break up in the body in order to tear through bones & such.

Would someone more gun savvy than me explain why these kinds of bullets are available to anyone but police & military

Because it's a good news story but meaningless in real life. None of the victims would have been skipping away whistling had they been shot with "normal" bullets. It's the high velocity chunks of metal ripping through the body that are the problem. Not the shape of them at impact.

____________________________

Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? ***. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

Tell her you don't need the gun and if she persists punch her in the face and say "see!"

(don't actually do that second part)

____________________________

Disclaimer:

To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? ***. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

It's coming out that the bullets he used were designed to break up in the body in order to tear through bones & such.

Would someone more gun savvy than me explain why these kinds of bullets are available to anyone but police & military?

Because badass bullets and big guns make you feel like a man as this advert for the gun he used to kill the children with takes pains to point out. And feeling like a man is every American male's right. It's in the constitution or something.

Besides, would you seriously consider going out and hunting something as vicious and dangerous as a deer if you couldn't sit half a mile away and target it through a laser sight before blowing its head off? It's what real men do.

He's presumably speaking at least in part of the US government's stance towards the American Indian throughout much of our history and its policy of subjugation, containment and elimination. Both of the people themselves and of their culture.

He's presumably speaking at least in part of the US government's stance towards the American Indian throughout much of our history and its policy of subjugation, containment and elimination. Both of the people themselves and of their culture.

If that's the sole reference, I disagree with its classification as genocide, but I'm not interested in debating the specifics, so... whatever.

Including the Japanese and communists might be a stretch but certainly there have been socially accepted groups whose goal was the elimination of black people (the KKK) and the elimination of gayness (churches).

Including the Japanese and communists might be a stretch but certainly there have been socially accepted groups whose goal was the elimination of black people (the KKK) and the elimination of gayness (churches).

It all depends on what definition of indiscriminate you use.

Perhaps this wasn't clear to you. I was asking Smash about

Quote:

you get a brutal thuggish country who committed multiple instances of genocide

I interpret country to mean, officially, the official United States of America, and not a general reference to include specific sub cultures that represent only a portion of the American population. Indiscriminate is someone else's argument entirely.

I interpret country to mean, officially, the official United States of America, and not a general reference to include specific sub cultures that represent only a portion of the American population. Indiscriminate is someone else's argument entirely.

Alright. Then all's I got is the Injuns.

Would teh War on Women count?

Edit - and my most sincere apologies for responding to a question that was for Smash - I'd suggest a pm in the future to avoid such misunderstandings. Besides Smash is probably busy wiping **** from butts.